Train Length in the 1940s

I always wondered how the pin in the coupler can stand the long trains without shearing off.

 

i wonder if the engineering types amongst us has ever calculated the force being applied to a pin in a 100 car train climbing a 2% grade, loaded down with coal.

 Siding werea lot shorter than they are today, probably anywhere from 30 to 70 cars long , a 100 car siding would be a really long one. Most small towns and villages had a siding and the larger towns also had  a train order office. However there were lots of siding out in the boonies in unpopulated areas.  We were still running with steam here in Ontario Canada,I don't know when the first diesel arrived.

 

How many loaded hopper could a F-F pull or a typical steam engine.. I'm only guessing but the double Fs might pull 30 on a typical subdivision with a few light grades, A loaded hopper with stone  is probably around 100 tons so 3000 tons. one horsepower per ton  might be close. 

 

The steamer...  A typical steam engine might be a Mikado 2-8-0. The workhorse of any railroad. How many cars would they pull, I don't know. 25??   There may be quite a difference with different hoggers. 

 It's not the pin that breaks  but the knuckle,  even worse the complete drawbar ripped right out of the car.    The larger railroad had special cars for measuring  this type of thing. 

How about some examples:

 

1940s thru 1950s

 

N&W usually handled 160 to 180 loaded coal hoppers, eastbound out of Roanoke, ascending the Blue Ridge grade, with a Y Class helper double-headed with an A Class road engine, plus a Y Class pusher on the rear. The rear pusher would cut off on the fly at the top of the grade, and the Y Class helper on the would be removed further east at Crewe, Va.  The A Class road engine would continue on unassisted to the tidewater coal unloading yard.

 

1960s

 

N&W westbound coal trains of 240 cars (23,000 to 24,000 tons) from Williamson, WVa to Portsmouth, OH with either 3 GP9s or 2 GP30s. Empty coal hoppers were returned back eastbound in 300 car trains powered by 3 GP9s.

 

Modern day, 2000 thru 2015

 

BNSF Powder river unit coal trains are usually 135 cars (18,000 to 19,000 tons) with two units on the front, and a DPU "radio controlled" pusher on the rear. 

not sure on freight, But Santa Fe used to put as many locos as needed for passenger service.

20-24 passenger cars with 4-6 locomotives.

1960s

 

N&W westbound coal trains of 240 cars (23,000 to 24,000 tons) from Williamson, WVa to Portsmouth, OH with either 3 GP9s or 2 GP30s. Empty coal hoppers were returned back eastbound in 300 car trains powered by 3 GP9s.

 

Downhill one way ? HW

Not "down hill" but all river grade, i.e. flat as a pancake, except for the big bridge of the Ohio River at Kenova.

Re Pennsy M1a, have seen photos captioned for a single M1a pulling 140 loaded hoppers/10,000 tons on the Middle Division. I would assume that also would be flat as a pancake, and that the M1a might have gotten a shove out of the yard. In my book, M1a's were a heck of a locomotive!

S. Kip Farrington, who rode and reported on quite a few locomotives in the '40's, noted riding  doubleheaded M1's from Greenville, NJ to Enola, PA, with 121 cars, 6180 tons, 188 miles, in five hours, 15 minutes. Assume doubleheading was for speed, as this was a symbol manifest, NL-1.

As reported in a Trains article in 1945 (reprinted in Classic Trains "Trains of the 1940s"), an AT&SF westbound freight across Arizona had 4-unit FTs, 61 cars and 3239 tons.

 

ChipR

PRR Middle Div. is a generally decending eastern  grade, thus giving the loaded hoppers less resistance than a completely flat profile.. I don't have the gradients handy, but can get 'em when I get home.  OTOH, Import ore drags, headed west, especially the super heavy "middle shipment" ones, would require two M1s pulling and two Hippos shoving all the way to Altoona.  Once there, yank off the M1s, and install a pair of Big Jays, and three big RSD7/ 15s in the middle, and a Centipede or snapper geared F unit set on the stern.  This was still absolutely unreal when I first saw it with all Diesel power in '67.

But were the cars the same size as today? I know box cars are much larger but what about the rest? Al

Yeah most rail cars today  are bigger that those of the 40s, In the forties  most were in the 39 foot range , tank cars . box cars,  hoppers.  I'm sure you've seen pics of ore trains with the really short hoppers.   It still comes down to weight  ... How many Tons can  certain  engines pull over the controlling grade(s) of a subdivision. The railways know and so do  train crews.

 

When Lifting cars  on the road &  figuring out the  tonnage I would add   a few extra tons  ..We certainly didn't want to double any  hills.

A big concern up north was the temperature. At 0°F, the wheels took twice the energy to move (no/few roller bearing trucks). The dispatchers had to radically reduce the tonnage on each train. Put snow into the mix and the tonnage was lowered even more.

 

Azubal; hoppers were usually 40-50 ton, tank cars were 6,000 - 8,000 gal maybe a bit more, flats and gons were all over the place (30' to 60'+). Stock cars had their own problems with regulations to feed, water and rest the livestock. With the advent of mechanical reefers, the dressed meat rode to Chicago instead of the animal. That's what I remember from the late 40s-early 50s.   

3500 to 4000 Feet would be a pretty good size for the average freight train in the 1940's.  That's 70 to 80 freight cars of that era.

 

These were the limitations:

1. Siding lengths of that era.
2. Capacity of air compressors (electric or diesel-electric locomotives) or air pumps (steam locomotives). Even though the trains might seem short, the number of cars equals the number of duplex reservoirs that must be charged and kept charged, as well as the number of brake pipe hose connections subject to leaking, especially in cold weather.
3. Draft gear strength.  Couplers were smaller than what we see today.
4. Air brake performance.  There were still many cars in the 1940's with Type K triple valves, which were not well suited to being more than 4000 feet from the engine.  Delays from failure of K triple valves to release (causing sticking brakes) were notorious. The remedies were (a.) make a deep brake pipe reduction and try to get all brakes released, or (b.) stop and send a Brakeman to manually bleed off the brakes which were sticking. Both remedies cause delay.  The most modern freight car brake equipment then was the AB control valve, which would have been found on only about half of the cars in the train.  

Certain railroads -- such as Norfolk and Western -- did run longer trains of coal, consisting of home road cars with uniformity of equipment, particularly AB control valves.  The uniformity of AB valves was a big factor in freight trains becoming longer after 1950.  The long freight trains operated by KCS and CGW in the 1950's would have been impossible with a significant number of K triple valves in the trains.

Popl, I don't mean to be argumentative, but it was a rare day when Santa Fe operated 20-24 car passenger trains.  It's true that Santa Fe did begin to use more than 4 units on passenger trains beginning in the late 1950's, however, in the 1940's (the era in question on this thread) Santa Fe passenger trains never used more than 4 F-units or 3 Alco-GE's or F-M's, or a large 4-8-4 (with a steam helper on heavy grade territory), and didn't exceed 16 or 17 cars. Typical passenger train length was 9 to 11 cars for the Super Chief, El Capitan, Kansas Cityan, San Diegan, and  Golden Gate trains, 12 for the Chief, and 12 to 14 for the secondary trains like the  Grand Canyon.

 

When passenger trains exceeded 18 cars, it was necessary to change the graduated release cap on every control valve in the train to Direct, and - after the train arrived at its final terminal - change each one back to Graduated.  Therefore, trains exceeding 18 cars were only operated in rare instances when there was abnormally high passenger traffic.  Santa Fe preferred to run passenger trains in sections instead.  Union Pacific, however, did operate very long passenger trains from the mid-1960's until 1971, but that's outside the scope of this topic.

I think what we would actually want to know is: How much tonnage would a pair of F3 or F7 units pull at 40-45 MPH on a gently undulating territory.  They could pull 1800 or 1900 each on such territory, but would bog down to 20 MPH when cresting gentle grades, and maybe really get rolling up to 30 MPH  going into the next gentle sag.  That would be unacceptable on most railroads, so limiting them to 1500 tons each would allow the train to keep going at 35 to 45 MPH in gently undulating territory.

Well I guess what I was getting at is that a 100 car coal train in 1945 would be no where as heavy as one today. So comparing the tow trains in car numbers is not the correct way to do it. We should use tonnage correct? Al

The C&O 2-10-4 T-1's were hauling 16,000 ton coal trains up to Toledo from Russell, Ky.

And then the Alleghenys did little different.

During the last days of Nickel Plate Steam operations in 1958, the NKP started loading down the "Berks" to see what they really could do. I believe I remember from Fort Wayne to Bellevue 248 cars were the record. Several trains were run at 160, 180 cars.

I don't know the details - did they shove him out of the yard? What speed was reached with 248 cars? Did they wish they had tried this 10 years earlier? WOW!

With that many cars behind the Berk, you have to wander about how many were empties. NKP was a lot more concerned with speed than many roads, like B&O, and the Penn.  Where were these super long chooches being run?  I remember Erie having to pull two freights together one time out in Ohio with one of their Berks, but this was an emergency situation, with 200+ cars.

Yes.   The engines are rated to pull a certain tonnage over the sub so we have to know the tonnage of the train.. Doesn't matter if it's 30 or 50 cars both could have the same weight. 

Having said that.... Short heavy trains   were  sometimes harder to get over the controlling grade because the whole train was on the grade all at once .  (depending on the sub.)

 

In the steam and the early diesel age, trains were generally shorter and also lighter. And the speed limits were also lower. I used to write down the number of cars on NKP Berk hauled trains, and 100-110 were the max. I don't know the qty of loads vs MT's.

When I started my career doing application work for a diesel loco builder, the railroads, in the U25/GP40 era, were assigning diesel HP based on HP/trailing ton. Drag freights had power applied at 1-1.5 HP per trailing ton, general freights at about 2 HP per trailing ton, and intermodals at as much as 4 HP/Trailing ton. Of course in mountain territory or applications with severe grades (over 1% on a mainline), you had to check continuous tractive effort and also adhesion, and the length of the grade. (With DC locomotives you would not want to operate below the MCS (minimum continuous speed) of any locomotive in the consist.) I recall one instance while doing this work that PRR leaving Erie with train #580 fried an E7 or E8 when they operated the E as a trailing unit behind a "black cat" Alco RS3, so I was especially cautious when making these recommendations..... The E units were geared pretty high for passenger service. I forget the MCS but think it was 21 mph or so. Obviously the train got below this speed for some time after leaving town, which was perfectly OK for the Alco.....